Kosovo war was not just, nor successful
David Clark's defence of this ill-conceived operation (Kosovo was a just war, not an imperialist dress rehearsal, 16 April) relies mainly on misrepresenting the motives and arguments of its critics. The Rambouillet "peace conference" was in reality a partisan exercise to manufacture an excuse for bombing the Serbs to punish them retrospectively for Bosnia.
Nato's attack on Yugoslavia was in flagrant breach of our charter obligations and thus an act of aggression. Far from stopping Serbian ethnic cleansing, it provided the excuse and motive for accelerating it: Kosovo Albanians started to be driven out of their country only after the Nato bombing began. The bombing failed in its objective (forcing the Serbs to accept withdrawal of their forces from Kosovo and installation of an international regime instead). It was only when President Clinton discreetly invited the Russians and Martti Ahtisaari, with his own representative, to rewrite the Rambouillet ultimatum, and accepted Russian participation in the eventual settlement, that the Serbs were forced to accept the new terms - which could have been agreed three months earlier if the US and UK delegations had negotiated in good faith at Rambouillet, without the need for a single bomb being dropped.
The misrepresentation of this disastrous, unnecessary and illegal misuse of force as a huge success was one factor predisposing Tony Blair to commit us three years later to an uncannily similar misadventure, on a bigger scale, in Iraq.
Brian Barder
London
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